A lesser-known element of Israel is its self-proclaimed status as the leading nation in animal rights. Critical examination of this insidious deceit is essential for neutralizing thIs strategic deception. Twenty-two months into the genocide, by August 2025, Israel had killed approximately 97% of Gaza’s animals. In addition to bombardment, orchestrated famine, habitat destruction and looting, there are also numerous videos of Israeli soldiers sniping animals, including horses and sheep, and settlers massacring infant sheep and goats. Israeli priests periodically film “practice” ceremonies in which they burn red heifers alive. While the Israeli armed forces routinely use trained military dogs to assault and rape detainees.
ALEXANDRA ISFAHANI-HAMMOND: A lesser-known element of Israel… is its self-proclaimed status as the leading nation in animal rights. A rich body of scholarship addresses the paradoxical relationship of veganism and animal liberation to colonialism in so-called Israel. On the one hand, the settler colony dehumanizes Palestinians, mobilizing the species divide to legitimize their erasure. On the other, it boasts of providing plant-based meals and synthetic combat wear to vegan soldiers.This framing perverts vegan ethics, which repudiate killing, confinement and the use of force against living beings. As Ahmad Safi, co-founder of the Palestinian Animal League, challenges, “What good is it if an Israeli soldier is vegan and wears leather-free boots if his gun is aimed at Palestinians?”…
This reality-distortion is known as veganwashing. Vegans for Palestine, a Global South abolitionist collective, exposes links between vegan businesses, apartheid and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. It unmasks Zionism’s entrenchment in everything from VeganFriendly branding to PETA, Mercy for Animals and the American Vegetarian Association. Vegans for Palestine has further investigated Israel’s pioneering “lab-grown” vegan food tech, mobilized as part of its constructed image as uniquely altruistic, eco-conscious and technologically cutting edge. Touted as the first head of government to taste cultivated meat, Benjamin Netanyahu declared “Israel will become an alternative meat superpower” and “It’s delicious and guilt-free.” In this aberrant reasoning, lab-grown meat enshrines the settler colony’s innocence, despite the apocalyptic slaughter it wreaks…
Veganism’s coupling with genocide is logically untenable. Critical examination of this insidious deceit is essential for neutralizing the settler’s colony’s strategic deception. Yet our concern cannot rest merely on the “animal” as a rhetorical figure of the settler imaginary. Twenty-two months into the genocide, by August 2025, Israel had killed approximately 97% of Gaza’s animals. In addition to bombardment, orchestrated famine, habitat destruction and looting, there are also numerous videos of Israeli soldiers sniping animals, including horses and sheep, and settlers massacring infant sheep and goats. One video of severed donkeys’ heads mounted by settlers on the wall of Al-Aqsa Mosque went viral. The Israeli armed forces participate in the long history of weaponizing dogs against non-Europeans in the service of Western empire-building, routinely using trained military dogs to assault and rape detainees. Israeli priests periodically film “practice” ceremonies in which they burn red heifers alive…
Animal studies scholars understand that the human/animal divide is a discriminatory invention wielded to justify denying moral consideration to members of any species. Displacement from the Human realm relegates all living beings to the same lethal vulnerability. Mohammed El-Kurd observes that Palestinians need be “defanged” and “declawed” to elicit Westerners’ empathy. To be “humanized” is to be delivered from barbarism. Unless they passively surrender to obliteration, Palestinians are no better than killable beasts. SOURCE…
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